Our story

Our team in the Computer Science Department at the University of Oxford started out in 2011 with the mission to bring Semantic Technologies into business and industry. We developed RDFox, the optimised RDF-triple store and parallel Datalog reasoner, which allows users to store millions of triples in RAM and conduct fast parallel Datalog reasoning.

RDFox has been under continuous development for the past five years in which RDFox has grown into a mature application, fit for purpose. The data structures and algorithms have been continuously refined until all performance bottlenecks were identified and removed. RDFox has also been applied in several pilot industry projects for prestigious partners, such as Siemens, Statoil, Kaiser Permanente, Skyscanner and Arma Suisse during which the functionality has been extended to match business requirements.

Our paper "Foundations of Declarative Data Analysis Using Limit Datalog Programs", co-authored with Mark Kaminski and Egor V. Kostylev received the best paper award at the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'17).

The leadership of OST

IAN HORROCKS

Ianis a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford where he leads the Information Systems Group.He is widely known for his work on description logic reasoning, where he developed algorithms and systems that set new standards for empirical tractability, and for his work on ontology languages, where he led the design and standardisation of the OWL ontology language.He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of Academia Europaea, and a fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAi).

Bernardo is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford.He has made key contributions to several critical aspects of ontology engineering, including modularity, information hiding and privacy, and debugging and repair, and he was awarded best paper prizes at ESWC-2006 and AAAI-2010.He currently holds a prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowship.

Borisis a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford.He has made many important contributions to the theoretical foundations of description logics and ontology languages, including rule and non-monotonic extensions, and the integration of ontologies and database technologies.He currently holds an EPSRC Early Career fellowship, and was the winner of the 2013 BCS Roger Needham Award for his work on intelligent information systems.

Peter is the Chief Executive Officer of Oxford Semantic Technologies.Peter joined us in January 2018 from IBM, where he was most recently the Program Director for IBM Watson IoT Platform Product Management.Peter joined IBM in 1999 after graduating from the University of Oxford with a First Class Master of Engineering Science.In 2008 he was awarded a Master of Science with distinction in Software Engineering from Oxford.

ADAM PARR

Adam is Chairman and co-founder of Oxford Semantic Technologies. He has lived and worked in Japan, South Africa, Australia and Europe in a career that has spanned several sectors. Between 2006 and 2012, Adam was chief executive and chairman of the Williams F1 Team. Since 2012, Adam has been an investor, advisor and director of several companies, including a number of spin outs of the University of Oxford. Adam is a graduate of the University of Cambridge with a PhD from London University (UCL). He is a Professor at the University of Western Australia and a director of the River Learning Trust, a multi-academy educational trust.

Investors

Oxford Semantic Technologies is a spin out of the University of Oxford.

We are part owned by the University’s investment arm (OUI), Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI), Samsung Venture Investment Corporation (SVIC) as well as a small number of private investors.